Doniell Charie's Comics

Well ... it all started when my husband suggested I draw something about Lemmings. He was laughing and I could barely understand him. When he settled down, we talked about lemmings and what I could draw, when he decided to look Lemmings up. This led to the creation of my Lemming drawing, perpetuated by an incedibly inhumane story ... by none other than Walt Disney!

Misconceptions and myths about Lemmings may have been around for centuries. In the 1500's, a German astronomer in Strasbourg (which is now in France, but is a very German city because it is right on the border) theorized that Lemmings fell from the sky when it stormed out, then died when Spring came. This was dismantled by a natural historian who completed many dissections on the poor animals, and decided that they were rodents, similar to other vole-like creatures.

Many people have believed for years that Lemmings commit mass suicide by herding or throwing htemselves over cliffs into the ocean or bodies of water. Well, Lemmings do travel in huge herds. But, they have an innate need for water. It's some sort of biological drive or whatever. What you don't hear though, is that Lemmings can swim and usually, when they're plunging into the water, it's to get to the water itself, or swim across it. They do stop at the water too. What they stop for, I don't know. So they're not always looking to get in the water. Though, in the case of reaching the ocean, what usually happens is Lemmings swim until they exhaust themselves and drown, because they can't get back out of the water. Lemmings generally live in more northern regions like northern Canada, Greenland, and Scandinavia. So, when they go over an edge into the ocean, they're pretty much not going to be able to save themselves seeing as those regions tend to be rather cliff-y and rocky. What really happens though, is as more and more Lemmings arrive at the water, all the other Lemmings end up being pushed in (penguins do this a lot too).

The myth of the "suicide" of Lemmings comes from Disney though. Walt Disney, to be exact. In 1955 there was a comic drawn about Donald Duck, that was inspired by an article on Lemmings in National Geographic - which just happened to show a picture of Lemmings going over a cliff and into the sea. Conveniently, Disney decided he wanted to do was a documentary of wildlife in the arctic regions. Thus, White Wilderness in 1958 was created. What actually happend was Disney had to have those Lemmings jumping the cliffs in his film, so he purchased Lemmings that were pets of Inuit children, and then placed on a snow covered turntable, and hence forced to run, which resulted in them literally being thrown into the sea. All this to simply create a myth and to kill Lemmings to support it.

Information for this blog was taken from numerous sources ... one being IMDB.